This is one of the main conclusions of “La Clau de La Innovació: go digital or go extinct” organized by Espaitec

With the support of the Castelló Provincial Council, on June 30 we organized the fifth session of «The Innovation Clau», an open and participatory debate between experts and citizens to address issues related to innovation.

On this occasion the debate, moderated by Juan Antonio Bertolin, director of Espaitec, focused on the concept of digitalization applied to education, health, industry and public administration, without forgetting the impact that COVID-19 has generated in the acceleration of the digitalization process and the user perspective.

Borja Columbus, boss of Administration and Public Innovation Service of the Castelló Provincial Council, began the debate by reflecting on the role of public administration. During his speech, he highlighted the work of the local institution to promote open government, calling on public institutions to promote digital transformation and thus achieve a new governance model where people are the center of all action.

In his opinion, digital transformation is superior to electronic administration. Electronic administration gives rights to citizens in their relationship with the administration, while digital transformation goes further, it involves incorporating technology into the logic of public powers as an organizational operating logic, that is, adapting services to the logic of the citizen by offering faster, more precise, higher quality services at a lower cost.

Patricia Garcia Zapico, general director of Innovation and Promotion of the Gijón City Council, highlighted the challenge of aligning technologies to make the management of public affairs easier, both for citizens and entities. This implies rethinking the current model since the administration is not a private company, it has other public values ​​that must be translated into friendly models.

Jordi Adell Segura, Director of Center d'Educació i New Technologies (CENT) of the Universitat Jaume I, spoke about the state of digital transformation in education, highlighting that it is urgent to carry out a digital literacy process by introducing digital competence in schools. “If digitalization is a profound transformation process, digital competence has to go beyond instrumental competence to not only create digitally competent citizens, but critical digital citizens capable of making decisions,” she said.

Regarding technology education, Adell highlighted that we must start with the digital competence of teachers, healthcare workers and other professional profiles, since COVID-19 has revealed many shortcomings. Regarding the model of making technology, Adell highlighted that assuming that only the neoliberal model exists focused on planned obsolescence and the use of data is a mistake. There are trends such as slow tech, which is committed to models focused on citizens, fair, clean and good in design.

The digital transformation in health has been represented by Michelangelo of the Aegean Chamber, secretary of the Association of eHealth Researchers (AIES), who emphasized the importance of medical technologies as decision support support tools and increased diagnostic accuracy. Along these lines, he highlighted the clear emergence of artificial intelligence in the field of surgery and radiology.

José Antonio Heredia Álvaro, Director of the Industry 4.0 Chair at the Universitat Jaume I, presented the point of view of digitalization in the industry and highlighted interaction and data as key elements of the process. «The changes in the industry are derived from universality. Technologies change, but the culture of data-driven management remains and is impregnated in our industrial system. Currently, the focus is no longer on the data, but on the use of more sophisticated data analysis models such as artificial intelligence methods.

The citizen, as largely forgotten in the digital transformation process, was represented by Miguel Pérez Subías, President of the Internet Users Association (AUI). Subías highlighted that throughout this digitalization process, attempts have been made to solve the problems of the administration and companies, not those of citizens. It is necessary to put the user at the center of the process to achieve better results.

At a time when data is critical, Subías highlighted that the citizen's forgetfulness is evident in their ability to generate data that they cannot control, however. He also made special mention of the right to be connected. That is, not only having access to the Internet, but also the necessary skills to make correct use of it. Finally, he highlighted the importance of the right to privacy and transparency, "we are losing the ability to be free, everything leaves traces and footprints in these digital cities," he concluded.

During the debate, all the experts agreed on the accelerating capacity that COVID-19 has generated in digitalization processes, as well as its ability to highlight professional and implementation deficiencies. The pandemic has been a sociological test that has caused an advance of decades in just months, although it has also put on the table everything that remains to be done and the lack of preparation of users for the final transformation.